Christmas music is easily my most uncritically sentimental music of that year and God bless it for that. Christmas is the one time of the year that I still let myself go all out and try to recreate my childhood (unlike the rest of my generation which seems hell bent on recreating every aspect of their childhood in a bubbling nostalgia bath as soon and as often as possible).
Of course at the same time, so much Christmas music is produced with such insufferably cheeriness that it's, well, insufferable. God knows the holidays are just as much about disappointment, an inability to recreate the past and the passage of time as about blithe celebration. Hopefully this mix will succeed in balancing that hope and alongside songs about the imperfect reality that is more often our lot.
Poles who speak English have an oddly charming way of turning phrases. I think it's the combination of the nation's famed "poetic soul" and the almost-familiarity of a second tongue. One of the things I enjoyed most when I lived in Poland was people's habit of describing things as "something terrible, but also something wonderful".
I couldn't think of a better description of radio than "something terrible, but also something wonderful" for music. The radio has exposed millions to mind-altering music and turned many a group of hopeful teens into prophets with an audience of millions. At the same time, radio has also always been a great homogenizer, sanitizer and censor of music, a trend that grows ever worse with Clear Channel playlists increasingly dominating the commercial dial.
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